I’m a big fan of emulation to keep older game consoles alive – most of my Saturn gaming is done with the excellent SSF emulator, for example.  It lets me avoid needing to hook up an 18-year-old console and, to be honest, I never would have completed games like Powerslave without being able to abuse the heck out of save states.

That being said, I have not really gotten the point behind PS2 emulation.  The hardware is easily accessible and PS2 games are generally tuned around the idea that the player should be able to finish them without needing to save every 30 seconds.

Nonetheless, I was watching a conversation in Rift’s in-game chat the other day that made me decide to actually track a PS2 emulator down, figure out how to rip a couple of discs and give it a go.

It turns out that the real draw isn’t really not needing to track down PS2 hardware.  It’s the ability to take a game like Ichigeki Sacchu!! HoiHoi-san, which natively looks like this…

…turn on 4x anti-aliasing, and have it look like this:

Suddenly, it all rather makes sense.

It’s rather nice to be late to the party on this one, to be honest.  It means that I get to play around with this on a mature and generally compatible emulator, even if I have to feel a little silly for not realizing for years why you’d want to use one over the original hardware in the first place.